Upgrading to newer releases

Like any other package, Lantz is changing over time. Most of the changes are backwards compatible and you don’t have to change anything in your code to enjoy the new release.

But every once in a while we to introduce some disruptive changes. We might realize that something error prone or the API was confusing. Or we might introduce a better way to do things and you might need to change your code to take advantage of it.

This section of the documentation enumerates all the backwards incompatible changes in Lantz, helping you to transition your code from release to release.

You can upgrade to the latest version of Lantz using pip:

pip install -U lantz

Upgrading to 0.3

We introduced the lantz.messagebased.MessageBasedDriver, a class to rule them all. Replaces SerialDriver, TCPDriver, VisaDriver, USBDriver, USBTMCDriver, SerialVisaDriver, GPIBVisaDriver, USBVisaDriver.

Migrating your driver to use MessageBasedDriver is easy:

  1. Add the necessary imports:

    from lantz.messagebased import MessageBasedDriver

  2. Change the base class of your driver:

    class MyDriver(MessageBasedDriver):

    # Your code

  3. In the class methods, change self.send by self.write; and self.recv by self.read. This was done to homogenize the API with PyVISA

  4. Change the class defaults to use the The DEFAULTS dictionary.

You are NOT forced to migrate you classes. The old base classes are still available under lantz.drivers.legacy. So you can just change the import.

While all instrument drivers have been migrated to the new MessageBasedDriver you can still used the drivers based on the legacy classes from lantz.drivers.legacy.

The only backwards incompatib